College football starts its season this weekend, with a partial slate of games ahead of a full launch over the Labor Day weekend. It’s the start of a season that will begin undoubtedly the biggest transition in the sport’s history.
When last on the national stage in January, the sport already faced major challenges, from athletes getting paid for their name, image, and likeness, to players transferring from school to school, to the expansion of a postseason playoff. And the past eight months have seen those challenges only shift into hyperdrive.
College football is in the midst of a series of evolutions so dramatic as to comprise a revolution, such that the sport that kicks off one year from now, in September 2024, will look dramatically different, particularly off the field, from the setting of just a few years ago. But the larger forces that sparked these changes are themselves in flux, so much so that the forces that “blew up” college football may not exist a few years from now.
A Historic Conference Realignment
In January, we already knew that four major powerhouses would switch conferences in the fall of 2024. Texas and Oklahoma had committed to switch from the Big 12 to the Southeastern Conference, while West Coast universities USC and UCLA had announced their move to the Big Ten, a conference traditionally based among the Great Lakes states (and which has had more than 10 members for three decades).
But the past few weeks have seen the
